Category talk:Prime Ministers of Britain (OTL)
One thing that I am hopeful about in TWTPE is the possibility of a good solid streak of British PMs. I have wanted for some time to create an article for PM of the UK, a la President of the United States, but the fact is that for all the PMs we have here, they are a scattered sampling from various stories, not a long series like the POTUS of 191. Churchill is succeeded by Mosely in ITPoMe, Wilson in 191, Atlee in MWtIH (and OTL, of course), Eden in WW. :Eden also succeeded him in OTL the second time around. Turtle Fan 19:49, May 15, 2010 (UTC) So maybe, just maybe, given that TWTPE is scheduled for six books, we can get a good hot streak to act as a backbone for an article. :That would be cool. My confidence is not strong that it will happen. Turtle Fan 19:49, May 15, 2010 (UTC) ::If it doesn't, I think I could live. Given how the Brit govt works, and how HT has things progressing, the office needn't change hands much over the course of the series. Chamberlain's support will probably stablize now that the German advance has stopped, so maybe he'll survive that third confidence vote. Since he did have cancer in OTL, and starting WWII in 1938 isn't going to rationaly change that, I can see him leaving office around book 3, either due to declining health or simply dying in office. Maybe Halifax gets the job in this world. :::I'll miss him--Chamberlain, that is. Halifax we've already got around here. Please God not Churchill, the damned story's more than OTL-ish enough as it is. Turtle Fan 20:42, May 15, 2010 (UTC) ::I should also suggest that a French PM streak might commence, the French loving to scrap their governments and all. TR 20:14, May 15, 2010 (UTC) :::That seems a bit more likely. Their frequent changes of constitution would complicate a continuous list a la POTUS, though. Turtle Fan 20:42, May 15, 2010 (UTC) And once again, a reason to be interested in that series is tied almost exclusively to this wiki, not because I'm really excited by the series itself. TR 18:55, May 15, 2010 (UTC) :Damn straight. Thank God we've got this place or that story would be even more tedious than it is. :Actually, this Wiki has an alarming tendency to introduce us to bad HT stories. For instance, the only reason I read that awful hamster story was so someone could do it up. On the other hand, I've also become acquainted with some good HT stories: all the ones on the Del Rey site, for instance. I had never heard of "Trantor Falls" before, either, nor of Foundation's Friends at all. ::I assume you mean the Tor site? And yes, I can think of a dozen or so stories I wouldn't have gone to the great lengths I did to read if not for this place. And a few of those were so bad ("The Thing in the Woods" and "Of Mice and Chicks" jump to mind) that the only comfort I could take was knowing that at least this wiki grew. TR 20:14, May 15, 2010 (UTC) :::Tor? Yeah, I guess. I just click the links and read the stories without paying much attention. (Hmm--We should be due for another one of those fairly soon, shouldn't we?) :::As for bad stories--Huzzah for Charles Lindbergh. Is "The Thing in the Woods" that bad, though? From reading the articles it sounded like a long walk for a lame ending, but I didn't get the sense that there was anything to dis''like about it. Then again, I haven't read it. Turtle Fan 20:42, May 15, 2010 (UTC) ::::The lame ending was enough. It's not that long of a story, and I read it on the bus ride home. But the ending is really out of left field. There is maybe one clue as to what's really going on, and the ending is so abrupt. TR 13:39, May 16, 2010 (UTC) :::::Gotta love "surprise" endings that jump up at you out of nowhere without flowing from anything in the story that the reader was aware of. I've never watched a single episode of [[Garanpo|''Columbo]], but I hear it works the same way. Turtle Fan 16:55, May 16, 2010 (UTC) ::::::Actually, I never watched Columbo either, because we learn who the killer is up front, and then watch Columbo figure out how the killer did it, invariably leading to Columbo finding some error that the killer didn't account for. I find no joy in knowing who the bad guy is in a murder mystery from the outset. :::::::Someone told me once that the formula for Columbo was, PD investigates crime, scratches their heads, are about to call it unsolved, then at the last minute Columbo says "Hey, guess what! You missed that never appeared onscreen" and they nab the bad guy. I wouldn't know Columbo from the wind, though. I dug up the one picture of him for the Literary Allusions article, but I would have grabbed anything that repeated in the first page of the Image search. (I wonder if there's some way to improve that--It's bitten us in the ass once or twice, with pictures that are not of the person we're claiming.) Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :::::::A backwards-mystery can be very satisfying, though. Think of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde--We knew whodunit, we needed the origins of the killer explained. There are other examples, but all a god deal more obscure than Jekyll and Hyde. It is tricky to pull off well, and it doesn't bear overexposure easily, so I'd be leery of making it the formula for a TV show. Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) ::::::A closer analogy would be the previously discussed series finale of St. Elsewhere, where it turns out the whole thing is the fantasy of an autistic kid. The ending doesn't make sense, and then it feels like a cheat on top of it. "Wait, these kids are afraid of werewolves, but they're vampires? Living in a town of vampires? What?" And adding insult to injury, we never learn what, if anything, was actually in the woods. TR 04:13, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :::::::Ah yes, the St Elsewhere ending. I never watched it. I understand that it also makes Cheers part of the dream, because they'd done a crossover, which in turn invalidates Frasier, et cetera. Newhart, of course, did the same thing, but that was a comedy so it's not so bad. Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :::::::As series finales go, I've never been as pissed as I was with The Sopranos. Even if someone did whack Tony, it came out of nowhere and didn't flow from the narrative of the episode, which was itself pretty damned weak, especially since the previous one (of which, by the way, I still have our discussion on my talk page) seemed to be setting up something so much better, to save that shit-tastic final season. I tell the uninitiated to stop watching the show after Season 5--The ending is no less conclusive, and obviously much more satisfying. Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :::::::Even that didn't offend me like JJ Abrams's Star Trek ending without them sending Old Spock back to prevent Romulus and Vulcan from ever having been destroyed--meaning NOTHING in Star Trek ever happened, except maybe Enterprise (though that ended with characters from another show walking out of the holodeck so I'm half-tempted to consider that a St Elsewhere itself) and some boring-ass episode of Voyager where Janeway's talking about how her ancestor built a goddamned mall in 2001. What they need to do for ST XII is have Pine and Quinto and the rest on the bridge. In pops John de Lancie, who takes a look around and says "What the fuck?" He snaps his Q-fingers, and we cut away to the Shatner/Nimoy bridge and watch a couple of classic episodes instead. Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :::::::But as for "The Thing in the Woods"--Well, it's not the least bit uncommon for kids to imagine they've heard something. Their parents know there's nothing out there, so they calm the kids down and put them to sleep and the kids forget all about it. Otherwise, young vampires should indeed be afraid of werewolves, if Hollywood is to be believed and the two races are traditional enemies. But the "Oh, yeah, we're all vampires"--You know where I've seen that before? Some Goosebumps book I read when I was a kid. One of the mediocre ones. (There were a few that were such ass-kickers, but they were very few.) Something about kids at a summer camp, strange disappearances, hints that the counselors are monsters, and then in the last three or four paragraphs the heroine's father shows up and tell her it was a training simulation for their under-cover infiltration of Earth. They're aliens, apparently. Even at a young age I remember reading that and thinking "The fuck . . . ?" Turtle Fan 04:51, May 17, 2010 (UTC) :And we might find we're ruined for reading HT without the wiki. I had fallen out of the habit of coming here when I read OA. I was forever catching myself planning to write about something. Then I returned a short while later and was greatly disappointed to find that there was no real need for OA articles anymore. Turtle Fan 19:49, May 15, 2010 (UTC)